With the holiday shopping season in full swing, the battle between Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft over which company will win the end-of-year sales crown is heating up.
Sonys PlayStation 3 sales nearly quadrupled in November at the expense of Nintendos Wii and Microsofts Xbox 360. The launch of a new 40-GB model along with price reductions buoyed the PS3, shuttling it beyond the Wii to earn top consoles sales in Japan for the first time.
"The Wii will be the big winner in 2007, but does anybody think Sony is going to be an also-ran player in this market?" asked Mike Goodman, a video game analyst at Yankee Group. "When all is said and done, its going to be a very close race and different products that are going to dominate in different marketplaces."
GAMES BY THE NUMBERS
Nintendo, however, is still king of the next-generation consoles in the U.S. Nintendo sold 981,000 Wii consoles in November, according to the NPD Group. That marks the Wiis highest tally since the console first launched in November 2006. Nintendo could have sold more, if there werent Wii shortages across the nation. Microsofts Xbox 360, meanwhile, sold 770,000 units.
For its part, Sony sold 466,000 PS3 units, NPD reported. Thats nearly four times the number it sold just a month earlier. Sony slashed the price of its PS3 by $100 in October, peddling the units for $499. The company also launched a new $399 40-GB model last month.
"In the end, it will be a race of percentage points. We wont have a market completely dominated by Sony like we saw in the last generation where the PS2 had 60-plus percent market share," Goodman said. "But in the long run, its still Sonys market to lose and theres an installed base of 140 million units that says why."
LONG BATTLE AHEAD
Sony figures it will sell more than 11 million PS3 units globally by the end of 2007. Analysts said those who are dooming the PS3 are failing to look at the product lifecycle for Sony consoles. Sonys consoles tend to have a 10-year lifespan. In fact, Sony sold 10 million units of the PlayStation 2 in 2007 and projects it will sell another 10 million next year.
"When the Wii and Xbox 360 are gone, Sony is still going to be selling 10 million PS3s a year," Goodman predicted. "For now, they are still making a killing on the PS2." Indeed, the profit margins on the PS2 are healthy, the game royalties are strong, and new software is still being introduced for the platform, Goodman said.
"Sony wanted to sell 20 million units like it did with the PS3 launch. Sony didnt intend to be in third place, but when you look at it in the long run, its not a bad story for Sony. In some ways, the PS3 is a console thats built for 2010, not necessarily for 2007," Goodman concluded.
